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Tag: schedule

I find myself wasting a lot of time creating calendar events that share a lot of properties, but differ in time of occurrence and duration. Auto-complete still requires per-field interaction.

For example, a band may rehearse regularly, but not on a fixed, repeating schedule that can be cleanly accommodated by a calendaring app’s recurring event interface. You want to be able to easily create an event involving the same people (your bandmates), usually at the same place (your rehearsal studio), with a varying date and duration.

Templates to the rescue.

Event Templates Pane

Once dropped to the calendar area, the template title text is given keyboard input focus to allow renaming from the default.

A Custom sorting option allowing the user to arrange the templates however they like might be useful. The set of templates you use may change over time as you work on different projects.

Double-clicking a template opens the editor.

Modifications to events created from templates do not propagate back to the template.

Deleting a template has no effect on events created from the template.

A menu command allows a stand-alone event to be used as the basis for a new template.

Event Template Editor

Modifications to templates do not propagate to events created from them.

As they exist outside of specific dates, only a default duration is set on a template.

All other properties can be set as with normal events.

Problems

Templates would not work cleanly in Contactizer‘s All events list view. What happens when you drop a template event to the list? A title field and date/time picker could appear at the drop point. It’s still likely to be less input than creating the event from scratch.